The event-related potentials study on empathy for pain in the subjects with autistic traits / 中华行为医学与脑科学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To study the features and neural mechanism of pain empathy in autistic individuals.MethodsTotally 21 subjects with high level autistic traits and 22 subjects with low level autism traits completed the pain empathy task,recording RT and accuracy automatically.The event-related potentials(ERPs) were recorded by Neuroscan system simultaneously.Results(1)From the behavioral results,the IRI scores of the two groups had significant differences in the factors of perspective taking ((23.71±4.16) vs (26.95±3.24)),empathy concerning ((24.10±4.04) vs (26.36±2.82)) and personal distress ((24.19±3.59) vs (19.82±3.96)) (t=-2.86,P0.05).(2) According to the behavioral result of pain empathy test,the main effect of task type in reaction time and accuracy of the two groups had significant difference (F(1,41)=24.21,P0.05,F(1,41)=0.29,P>0.05;F(1,41)=3.20,P>0.05,F(1,41)=0.14,P>0.05).(3)From the results of ERP,the main effect of emotion type,task type and group didn't reach the significant level in the N2 amplitude of the two groups(F(1,41)=0.04,P>0.05;F(1,41)=0.08,P>0.05;F(1,41)=3.86,P>0.05).The main effect of emotion type had significant difference in the P3 amplitude of the two groups(F(1,41)=8.27,P0.05,F(1,41)=0.25,P>0.05).It had significant difference in LPP amplitude in the main effect of emotion type,task type and group(F(1,41)=32.07,P<0.01;F(1,41)=8.63,P<0.01;F(1,41)=4.73,P<0.05).ConclusionsThere are differences in the abilities of empathy between the high and low level autistic traits groups,especially in the late processing of pain empathy.